This weekend I will be heading out to Fort Wayne, IN with five of my friends. We have a hockey game and lazer tag planned, but I hope we do more than just that. Also, I’m writing this post using Flock, the coolest thing I’ve seen since ScreenToaster.
I got my laptop back from HP on friday. I am glad to have my laptop back, especially since I have lots of work to do now with school, IT, and WVUR. It took HP only 2 days to fix my computer, which I think is very reasonable.
My video card on my laptop decided that it didn’t need the fan on anymore. Bad decision, computer. Well, now my computer is in a box being sent back to HP for a free repair. Thank goodness for warrantys. Also, I must say that although I had to wait 20 minutes on hold for an actual person, the man I spoke with answered all of my questions and helped me out a lot. Thanks HP Technical Support!
During times of war, it is common for any type of government to become more aware of its enemy. In the second World War, the United States openly targeted people of Japanese origin, and after the attack on the World Trade Center the United States became suspicious of people with Arab-Muslim background. The biggest recent step that the United States government took towards enforcing racial profiling was the act called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act). Although previous political movements are hailed as terrible, the USA PATRIOT Act could be enforcing racial profiling. However, the USA PATRIOT Act has done a fine job at protecting our borders from the real threat of terrorism.
The USA PATRIOT Act goes against (more…)
Today was the last day of interviews for me. I was interviewing for jobs next school year in the IT department. I interviewed for the Help Desk on Tuesday, and Web Services on Thursday. I only applied to the two fields that I knew I would feel comfortable in. The full time staff member who interviewed me for the Web Services basically told me that I had the job. He was really happy to see that I was interested in the job, and he asked me what position I wanted. This made me feel really good about myself, basically knowing that I have a work-study job next year. I was nervous about the whole “find a job” process, but really it was rather pleasant. My Help Desk interview lasted for a good hour and a half, but it felt like 45 minutes. It was, in one word, fun.
This can only help me with my WVUR webmaster position, and my major. Yay!
There are many ways to record this to and from your computer. There are also limits on every computer. Some setups are better than others. Taking all of these statements for their true value, let’s analyze what most computers have. Most computers come stock with an audio card with a stereo (2 track) output. You probably refer to this jack as the headphone jack. Most computers also come with a microphone jack. Almost all microphone jacks record just one (mono) channel. If you are a serious recorder, this will not get the job done.
So how do you get around this problem? My solution was to record from my USB port. Some new audio boards have USB cords that you can plug directly into your computer, but these boards can be expensive and may take up too much room. Also, if you already have a board, you don’t want to shell out the money if you don’t need to. My USB to RCA cord came from CyberGuys. It works fine with Apple Mac, PC, and Ubuntu (all tested by myself). Technical details are on their site. Also, using the USB port to record audio gives you an added bonus; no noise! If you have a quiet audio source and you amplify the heck out of it, you may notice that some noise comes in to the recording. For a professional sounding recording, use USB, trust me.
I already had an audio board before I wanted to record onto my computer, since I was in a band in high school. It is an MG102C made by Yamaha. All you really need is RCA in an out for the bare minimum. If you want to record from a microphone, I recommend using XLR. It’s the best and what the pro’s use. My board has more than enough inputs on it, which means that what I use is too expensive for what I need, but at the time of it’s purchase, every port was in use. Also make sure if you are recording from microphone that you have Phantom Power. Some microphones need this to work.
Putting all of these components together requires two (2) RCA cables (male to male). Hook up both cables to the USB adapter. Hook up the other ends of the RCA cables to your audio mixer-board.
If you have more questions or you have troubles getting the USB to RCA adapter to work (because there are some troubles doing so) let me know via email at lange.j.r{at}gmail.com
I had previously installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, and quickly fell in love with it. I feel very secure on this Operating System. Unfortunately, I was using Windows Vista, I was running a anti-virus scan, and I shut down my computer accidentally. This in turn corrupted my Vista OS. Luckily, I didn’t loose anything, except for my original Ubuntu partition.
Last night I re-installed Ubuntu. I’m back! I also figured out how to do some more stuff, like record audio in stereo using Audacity. It’s pretty cool. I’ll write a post on how I can record in stereo later this week. It only cost $110 for me to do it, but you could do it for cheaper.
So I have created a Podcast out of interest in the topic. It is located at http://www.jeffreyrobertlange.com/podcastgen/. I submitted my feed link to iTunes, and with much prayer, I have gotten full integration in the iTunes store! If you open iTunes, click on iTunes Store, and search for “Jeffrey Robert Lange” in the top right search box, my podcast shows up! Even cooler, it also suggests my name after you type the “R” of Robert. I’m totally amazed. Now, to update WordPress.
Like most well formed websites, WVUR wants to add more graphics to their pages. Jeremy came up with a way to grab a random picture from the SourceStock image folder, which is working quite well. One issue with the site, or rather valpo’s server in general, is that you can’t see the files you upload until an even hour. For example, if you upload a picture, it will be uploaded right away, but it won’t go to the live site until 4, 6, 8, 10 pm. If you upload a picture at 4:05, you have to wait until 6 until the stage loads it. However, the CMS runs on MySQL, which is an ever refreshing database, so if we write a blog and the picture we want is already live on our server or another server (aka Flickr), the picture will show up right away.
On a whim, I suggested that we set up a Flickr account for WVUR and just upload pictures there. Jeremy wondered how easy it would be to have everyone upload, though. Whenever you introduce another feature, it shouldn’t require a new login or page to go to, that’s just a simple rule. Jeremy, on a whim, wondered if Joomla, the CMS we use for WVUR, made an component that would allow upload to Flickr. We couldn’t find one in the twenty minutes we spent looking, but we did find a PHP script that would do the exact same thing. Sweet! If that turns out to be a hassle, we could always just make a page that has Flickr in a “frame” (technically a wrapper) on the WVUR page.
What does this mean for our audience? More pictures, and faster! Woo!
I think we can remember back to the days of 1999 when there was some strong concern for the Y2K, or Year 2000, bug. Many technologically driven devices like computers all have internal clocks, and some of the older clock systems did not foresee a year 2000, so many years were abbreviated to just the last digits. Instead of the year 1989, a programmer could save some 0’s and 1’s by just making the year 89, and then have the program translate the 2 digit year later. This problem mainly occurred in Windows based systems or programs.
Well, Y2K was not as bad as many people had thought, but it did affect some computers. The problem now lies in the year 2038, where a different kind of computer will be affected by this same general problem. These computers are servers that run Unix. Believe it or not, the internet is a large amount of computers that mainly run on a different system instead of windows. These computers are generally called servers and their size can range from anything from a normal desktop to a large refrigerator. These servers usually run a different operating system like Linux/Unix instead of Windows because Windows is user friendly, and straight up information does not need to be user friendly, it just needs to exist. Think of a server as a basic Excel document, and a user friendly operating system like Windows is like a bar graph. Same information, just presented differently.
Like all information, the time on computers is stored in 0’s and 1’s in a format called binary. The time is a strand of these 1’s and 0’s like 1101101 11011101 11000011 01111110 or something similar. Unfortunately, there will be some problem with the year 2038 because it will exceed the previously set year for 0’s and 1’s. It will roll over from all 1’s to all 0’s, like an old odometer on a car.
This can be prevented by some updating of all systems that use Unix, but that is no small task. I just don’t want to see the internet fall into thousands of pieces because of a few missing numbers.
